Elizabeth Anna Hart

| name = Elizabeth Anna Hart | image = File:Elizabeth-anna-hart.jpg | imagesize = | caption = Margaret Bonham | birth_place = London, England | occupation = Poet, Writer | nationality = British | genre = Poetry, Children's Literature | language = English }} Elizabeth Anna Hart, née Smedley, also known as Fanny Wheeler Hart, (1822-1890) was a British poet and novelist born in London. She was a cousin of Lewis Carroll's through her aunt, who was Carroll's grandmother. Hart wrote children's poetry with her sister Menella Bute Smedley as well as novels, including Mrs. Jerningham's Journal and The Runaway.

Biography

Hart was born in 1822 to Rev. Edward Smedley, a clergyman, critic, and poet and Mary Hume Smedley. She married an officer in the Indian Army, and had no children.

Writing

Wood-engraver Gwen Raverat was a fan of Hart's 1872 novel The Runway, which the artist described as "a gay, rather farcical book, which was the delight of my own childhood (and I supposed of the generation before as well) and has been very much loved by my own children, and by many others". Raverat asked publishing house Macmillan if they would publish an edition of the novel with her art. It was reissued in 1936 with sixty of Raverat's engravings after Duckworth accepted the project.

An illustration from The Runaway

The Runway was also reissued by Persephone Books with afterwords from Anne Harvey and Frances Spalding.

Legacy

Her novel, Wilfred's Widow, was met with positive reviews. The Athenaeum wrote it “shows a good deal of that quiet humour in which women...so often excel....The style is bright and simple throughout, without any affectation of cleverness, and the characters appear as clearly as if they had been forced to unfold themselves in whole chapters of self-analysis.”

The Runway has been labeled a children's classic. Ellen Brink's "Two Girls in Love: Romantic Friendship and the Queer Family in Elizabeth Anna Hart's The Runaway" presents a queer reading of the story, arguing the novel "gives a new validity to same-sex adolescent desire as something that is not merely one moment or a phase, to be cast off in a developmental narrative of 'growth' towards adulthood" by Hart "[imagining] a queer family of two in which it can grow and flourish".

Works

• Try, and you Will: a Story for Youth (1859)

• Mrs. Jerningham’s Journal (1869)

• Child-World (1869)

• The Runaway: a Story for the Young (1872)

• A Very Young Couple (1873)

• Paws and Claws: Being True Stories of Clever Creatures, Tame and Wild (1874)

• Miss Hitchcock’s Wedding-Dress (1875)

• Tiny Houses and Their Builders (1876)

• Harry (1877)

• Silver wings and golden scales (1877)

• Freda (1878)

• Very Genteel (1880)

• Two fourpenny bits (1880)

• Poor Nelly (1880)

• Three Epochs in the Life of a Woman (1881)

• Wilfred’s Widow (1883)

• May Cunningham’s trial (1883)

• Mr. Burke’s nieces (1883)